Paper short abstract:

The proposed paper complicates the conventional understanding of care flows and pitches the idea of reverse care flow between aging parents in India and their professional transnational migrant children to make a case for using life-course perspective in transnational migration research.

Paper long abstract:

The Longitudinal Aging Survey of India report of 2020 notes that increased transnational migration of young adults as professionals and rising lifespan has led to many elderly parents living alone. Although the concept of family and kin-based care in India has received considerable scholarly attention, transnational care-circulation, especially in the era of connected neo-liberal economies and increased migration and mobility, is an understudied topic. Recognizing that the lives of older people are entangled in transnational contexts and mobilities, the proposed paper moves beyond limited research on transnational kinning in India that focuses on how kin and care relations are sustained by adult migrant children for their ‘left-behind’ aging parents. Instead, it argues that even as elderly parents ‘age in place’, while their adult children seek mobility and livelihood across the globe, aging parents actively assume ‘kinning’ and caring responsibilities for their adult migrant children and grandchildren at critical junctures of their life. In doing so, this paper makes a case for life-course perspective to examine (re)making of kinship on the move and also counters the dominant understanding of aging as a debilitating dependent experience. Using ethnographic study of migrant professionals and their aging parents in India, this paper examines this reverse care flow, how it is transacted across borders and the various forms it assumes. It will unravel how transnational kinning is negotiated in the context of cultural practices, gendered identities, pandemic situations and the expanding use of digital modes of communication that shape kinship relations in a transnational context.